Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree
by Alifredson
Summary: Post Agent Carter Season 1/ MAoS season 2 finale: A strange visitor changes everything for Peggy Carter. 68 years in the future, interesting relics of the past resurface. Implied Steggy and FitzSimmons.


_Monday, May 12, 1947_

Peggy Carter steeled herself for another week working amongst and being degraded by the men of the SSR as she climbed the staircase to the correct floor. She was forty-five minutes early; nightmarish memories of Steve's crash had plagued her in the middle of the night and no amount of tea could calm her. She had cleaned the apartment she now shared with Angie, courtesy of Howard Stark, and then tried to distract herself with a novel and the radio, neither of which had helped. She had sat, dressed and coiffed, for over an hour before she decided that if she walked to one of the further train stops, she would arrive at work at a respectable hour.

She was glad to see she was the first of her coworkers to arrive. Most of the men generally ignored her. However, a few of the newer ones treated her like a secretary, as the others had before Chief Dooley's demise. Sousa, the only one who had been at least cordial before, had taken to either ignoring her or glancing at her with doe eyes. He was still angry at Peggy for keeping him in the dark and she was annoyed that Sousa had ultimately believed her (and her sex) as weak as the other pig-headed chauvinists. She would not be apologizing first.

Chief Thompson's light was on and his door open, so he was there as well, but he had gotten used to Peggy's more-than-occasional early starts. He would not bother her. Many things had stayed the same in the two and a half months since Thompson had become chief, but he had certainly changed in the way he treated Peggy. He had given her a few field assignments in the month after his promotion, but the men had been bullheaded and often refused to take her seriously as a partner. Finally she had enough and complained to Thompson who then began to send her on solo, primarily undercover, missions. She liked them. That the men would get mad when she inevitably got the more interesting cases, she liked even more.

Barring any Act of God today would be a boring day, full of paperwork. She had arrived back from a two week long mission in Bulgaria on Thursday after having retrieved an object of unknown origin. It was large, constantly changed from solid to liquid and back again, and had been a bugger to get back home to New York, even with the help of the Howlers. Writing up the report for the object, the summary of the mission, the reports for the three captives they had taken, the report for the one guard that Dugan had shot, and going to oversee the scientists' work on the object would easily take the new two to three days.

Lunch at the automat was a welcome reprieve. The fans in the automat blew away the mid-spring heat; it was nearly 75 degrees, whereas the SSR had yet to set the fans up. The rising temperatures had snuck up on Peggy. Angie, who was now working as a dresser and as an understudy for a small part in _Annie Get Your Gun,_ joined her and immediately started berating Peggy for not getting enough sleep when she saw the dark circles under her eyes.

"You need to take some time off, English. Relax a while," Angie insisted.

Peggy waved her off. "I sleep better when I'm busy; it exhausts me. The problem is when I don't have enough to do." Angie leveled her with a probing glare which Peggy tried her best to ignore.

"I know you miss him." Angie said, laying her hand over Peggy's. "But you have to move on. If he cared for you as much as it seems he did, he wouldn't want you to be unhappy. You and Howard both. Look, there's this stage manager on the show I think you would like. Dark hair, green eyes, very attractive. He's just your type. Let me set something up. You could go dancing and…"

"No, Angie. Thank you, I have so much to do right now and I don't like the idea of starting a relationship by lying about what I do."

Angie sighed, having had this conversation several times over the past few months. "Well, you don't seem inclined to give your job up and all I ever hear about is how all the guys you work with are morons. Are you planning on staying single forever? What happened to wanting to have a family?"

Peggy pinched the bridge of her nose, thinking that the overly humid bullpen at work was now preferable to the grilling she was receiving, no matter how nice the well-circulated air felt on her face. "I don't know Angie. I have certain priorities, and right now that isn't one of them."

"You aren't going to get younger."

"We're still recovering from the war. I'm where I need to be, anything else I can sort later. Excuse me, my hour is nearly up." Peggy put her half of the bill on the table and walked back to work.

In the hour she had been out, all hell had broken lose and Peggy walked into an office of frazzled yelling. The snippets she had caught had given her very little information. "Said some artifact just spat it out!" "Not possible, someone got in and security are just trying to save their own tails." "Probably Hydra."

A whistle cut through the chatter and everyone shut up as the Chief stepped out of his office. "Enough. Everything is well in hand. Get back to work. Carter, with me. Got a job for you." Thompson called.

"Ahh, Chief, wouldn't it make sense to have one of us handle it instead of Carter. I mean, anyone with a little muscle could break her in two," Kyle Fisher, one of the new agents protested. A mixture of low agreeing murmurs followed from many of the other men.

"On the contrary, Agent Fisher, Agent Carter could take out you and half of your friends before the others had a chance to get to her. And congratulations, you've earned yourself a spot tailing the Austin brothers for the next month." Fisher groaned and Thompson spun around and headed off down the hallway. Peggy followed quickly, pulling up next to him as he hit the call button for the elevator.

"Thank you Chief." He didn't acknowledge her and she rolled her eyes. "So what is it that happened? I haven't been able to get the story since I got back from lunch."

"That rock you brought back," he started as they got in the elevator, "spat out a person, a girl. She's been hysterical, screaming for a 'Fitz' and we can't get a thing out of her. No idea how she got inside that thing, whose side she's on, what she wants, where's she's from, although, English accent, so…"

"So, I'm babysitting," Peggy replied with disgust, "because she's female and English."

"No. You are going to calm her down because you're female and she'll relate to you better. Your accent will make her feel more at home. Then, you are going to find out what the hell is going on and report back to me with recommendations."

 _Glorified babysitting_. Peggy thought, but kept her mouth shut. Perhaps she should take Howard up on joining that new organization he was creating. She was going to call him tonight.

Peggy observed the girl through the one-way glass. She had pressed herself into a corner of the room, crouched down in tight black trousers and black sweater over a white blouse. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs, although whimpers of "Fitz" or "Leo" were common and "Coulson," "Skye," and "May" were occasional. Three guards, _armed_ guards, stood opposite her, tall and bulky, blocking the door.

"A bit much," Peggy said, motioning to the guards. "I want them out when I go in."

"Carter, they're there for protection. We don't know…"

"Thompson, honestly. She's already been searched, no weapons. All they'll do is intimidate her and I won't be able to gain her trust."

Thompson sighed. "Fine, but they're standing outside and if she tries to make a run for it…"

"Fair enough." Peggy walked out of the room to the next door over and gave two sharp knocks before she eased it open. The guards had parted to allow her entrance, but their prisoner had not looked up, and instead seemed to be holding her breath. "Chief Thompson has need of your assistance elsewhere," she informed the shortest of the three, McArdle, who she knew was the leader.

He gave a nod in return. "Ciskowski, you're with me. Waters…"

"Will join you as well." Cameron pursed his lips, but didn't argue and led his men out of the room. The door shut with a _click_ behind them.

Peggy moved to the center of the room where a table and chairs sat and took a seat in one. "Now, we'll not get anywhere if you sit there whingeing all day. Get up. Come and sit down. You'll not be hurt here." The girl's shoulders eased a bit, but she didn't move. "Come on, I haven't all day." Peggy said impatiently.

The girl got up, shuffled to the chair across from Peggy without looking up, and sat down gingerly. "I'm sorry." She said, her English accent pronounced. "I just don't know how I got here or _where here is_. And I'm supposed to meet Fitz… _Leo_ for dinner and with how everything has been so strange the last year I just wanted everything to go perfectly, but he's going to go looking for me and _I won't be there_." She broke into sobs again. Peggy looked to the ceiling, willing Steve's spirit to give her his patience and empathy.

It didn't work. _What would Steve do?_ "Who is Leo?" Peggy asked, hoping if the girl just talked she could get something useful.

"Leo Fitz. He's my partner. He's engineering, I'm biochem. We work together. And he's my best friend, but something happened last year and he was sick. I had to go away for work and he's been so angry at me for leaving. We just started to mend what was broken… and that _thing_ dragged me away." The last bit was said with vehemence. "Where am I?"

The girl finally looked up. Her expression changed from despair to utter shock to some mix of bubbling enthusiasm and abject terror. "Peggy Carter? A-agent Peggy Carter? Oh my God! Forget 'where am I?' _When am I?_ "

The pair sat, in shocked silence, staring at each other. Peggy recovered first. "How do you know my name?" She demanded quietly, but with authority.

"You, you're a legend. You founded… well… I'm not sure I'm allowed to say that. What year is it? If you're this young, it most certainly isn't 2015. Although _he_ is this… never mind. Can't say that. I _know_ I can't say that." She paused for a moment before her face lit up again. "Howard Stark has to be alive still! Oh, Fitz would be so jealous! I mean, he's worked with Tony's tech before, but Howard Stark is as much his idol as you are mine!"

Peggy furrowed her brow, trying to make sense of the absolute nonsense the girl was spewing. "Alright. This makes absolutely no sense…"

"Oh, but it does! Don't you see? That _thing_ " her face turned sour, "pulled me out of 2015 and dropped me here in…"

"1947," Peggy supplied. "Are you saying that artifact is a time machine?"

"Yes and no… it's not a _machine_ , or it wasn't as far as we could figure. It's organic, but not Terran in origin. Fitz said there was an electrical charge coming off it, but it had a strange magnetic field that kept the charge from affecting anything around it. Then the inhumans were trying to get to it, so that could mean any score of things… but it did send me back sixty-eight years, my _parents_ aren't even alive yet, so yes, sort of a time machine." She gave a short laugh and under her breath mumbled something that sounded like ' _wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey-stuff indeed.'_

Peggy tried to take from that what she could. _Organic, alien, electro-magnetic time-machine._ Perhaps the SSR would give it to Howard; there was certainly no one here who could work with it.

After three hours of listening to the girl, Jemma, ramble on about mostly things that she didn't understand, Peggy finally exited the room. "I don't understand most of the science," Peggy told Chief Thompson, who stood against the door to the observation room hand running through is hair in frustration.

"Who would?"

"Howard, possibly, but it seems like a lot of this is too advanced for Jemma and her colleagues and that's with the technological advances they seem to have, that we don't."

"Do we really think she's from the future? And what's with her knowing you?"

"I don't know, honestly. We suspected that this artifact was alien and who knows what alien artifacts are capable of… so Jemma being from the future? Not out of the question. Her knowing me… and Howard… that worries me, especially because she's refusing to say anything else about it. Everyone knows Howard, but the only people who know my name are our enemies. My instinct says she's alright, and it hasn't steered me wrong before… I just don't know."

"Until we have a better idea, I want her under watch. I had Sousa set up a room for her that's secured and she'll stay there until we figure out what to do. Call Stark, see if he can come in and look at this thing. Until further notice, you work on her and you're Stark's liaison, no one else can handle him."

That night, she called Howard, who, conveniently, had been getting on his plane to visit New York before his next trip to the icecap to look for Steve's remains. Peggy went to bed early, eager to catch up on the sleep she had lost the night before and to avoid Angie for just a little bit longer after their argument over lunch. She woke at 4AM to a pounding on her bedroom door and Howard's voice telling her to wake up. They left to go to the office early, Howard was eager to get to work on the artifact and Peggy needed to organize her thoughts before she spoke to Jemma again.

On the way, Howard told Peggy about his idea for the _Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division_. "Awfully long name." Peggy commented.

"I just really wanted the initials to spell SHIELD."


End file.
